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Saturday, May 19, 2012

‘B’deshi girls trafficked under honeymoon cover’

Dhaka: Human traffickers in Bangladesh have found an innovative method of smuggling out young women into India under which the girls along with their pimps are shown as honeymooners to cross the border "legally", said the chief of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) on Saturday.

BGB Director General Maj Gen Anwar Hussain said they have rescued around 70 women and children along the Indo-Bangla borders from human traffickers in the past three months.

He said the girls were often trafficked into India in the guise of honeymooners.

"Traffickers are changing their tactics and routes, while poor girls and women are falling prey to human traders who allure people with lucrative job offers abroad," Hussain told national news agency BSS on the sidelines of the launching national plan of action to combat trafficking for 2012-2014.

The chief of paramilitary border guard said the BGB has identified nine other means of human trafficking from Bangladesh that included fake offer for tourism, fake job offer, domestic violence and fake marriage.

"The saddest part of the trafficking was that much of the rescued girls or young women cooperate the traffickers to cross the border expecting a better life," Hussain told the function also joined by Home Minister Sahara Khatun, Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, Overseas Employment Minister Khandoker Mosharraf Hossain and Prime Minister's foreign affairs advisor Gowher Rizvi.

No official statistics were available to assess the number of women trafficking victims but the Home Ministry officials feared the figure could range between 100,000 to 200,500 every year.

Home Ministry's additional secretary Kamal Uddin said the human trafficking involved a turnover of USD 13.6 billion per year globally and it ranked third after dug and arms smuggling.

Bangladesh is generally a source country for trafficking of women, children and men. Thousands of people are trafficked every year, mainly in the form of fraudulent recruitment for overseas jobs.

The new national plan of action against human trafficking seeks to address weaknesses of previous plans as a follow up of government's enactment of the Human Trafficking Deterrence and Suppression Ordinance of 2011.